Duncan Grazier Duncan Grazier

Career

  • The Org Chart Is the Product

    For most of my career I thought I was building products. Looking back, I was mostly building org charts. The customer gets the coordinated output of the whole company, and for the first time that coordination is something you can build instead of staff.

    · 3 min

  • Radical Uncertainty Is the Job

    Most advice about building a company is the answer to a puzzle. The hardest parts were never puzzles. They are mysteries, and more data does not settle them. Make changing your mind cheap, and bring judgment to the rest.

    · 4 min

  • The Org Chart Is Flattening & Nobody Has a Replacement

    One company put AI usage into performance reviews. Another cut about 30,000 people to fund data centers. Both point at the same shift: the engineering ladder assumed experience equals output, and that no longer holds. Nobody has built what comes next.

    · 7 min

  • Are You Managing Your Manager?

    Plenty of books teach managers to manage. This is for the engineer: four steps to draw great management out of your manager. Dreams, alignment, goals, and feedback. From my talk at Code Driven NYC.

    · 6 min

  • Past performance not indicative of future results

    Investment firms print that warning for a reason. Hiring is an investment too, and a résumé is past performance. Weigh the cost of a miss against the upside of a person who wants to grow.

    · 2 min

  • Speculation

    Do not speculate about a bug. Take ten minutes and read the source. Twelve keystrokes can put the real answer on your screen.

    · 1 min

  • Conquering Boredom

    What I do with dead time: a list of small ideas to build, some reading outside my field, and a quick tour of a language I do not know.

    · 2 min

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